Touchscreen devices are becoming ubiquitous. These devices include smartphones, tablets and desktop and laptop computers. Anecdotal evidence indicates that touchscreen devices enable increased usage of computer applications by children, and particularly very young children. Examples of these applications are computer games.
Further anecdotal evidence indicates that several device owners leave the devices with their children for extended periods of time, during which time children might accidentally navigate away from the specific application with which they are supposed to be interacting, and access some other application. Sometime, the other application enables the child to make a purchase. There have been examples of device owners incurring substantial invoices for purchases accidentally made by their children. Alternatively, even if the child does not cause any negative impact, they may have navigated away from the specific application and wish to re-access that application but do not have the knowledge to do so.
The above example is just one example where the owner of the device must implicitly trust a guest user of the device who presumes to use the device to access one or more specific applications, and where the owner presumes the guest user would have no need to access other applications or other data on the device.
In case of children, they may exit the specified application accidentally. Whereas in case of guests, the use could be to protect the information while the device is being “temporarily loaned” by the owner of the device. In both cases, the desire to protect the information remains.
Traditional methods of application lock existing by rebooting or going to a special screen to unlock the device are limiting and cumbersome. These option also limit the user experience as a user might accidentally reach the unlock screen, and hinder the experience associated with current application.
It is an object of the following to obviate or mitigate at least one of the foregoing disadvantages.